In 1976,
The first commercially developed supercomputer was released;
The Philadelphia Flyers played a hockey game against the Red Army team of the Soviet Union;
The Pittsburgh Steelers won Super Bowl X;
The first commercial Concorde flight took off;
The Winter Olympics took place in Innsbruck, Austria;
Clifford Alexander, Jr. became the first African-American Secretary of the US Army;
Harold Wilson resigned as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and James Callaghan replaced him;
The Washington Metro opened;
The New Jersey Supreme Court ruled Karen Ann Quinlan could be disconnected from her ventilator;
Apple Computer Company was formed;
Frampton Comes Alive! was the best-selling album of the year;
The Boston Celtics won the NBA Championship;
The ABA and NBA merged;
The CN Tower opened in Toronto;
The Seychelles were granted independence from the United Kingdom;
In Gregg v. Georgia, the Supreme Court of the United States reinstated the death penalty as a constitutional acceptable form of punishment;
The United States celebrated its bicentennial;
The Summer Olympics took place in Montreal;
The “Son of Sam” terrorized New York City;
NASA released photographs of the “Face on Mars;”
The Seattle Seahawks played their first football game;
Frank Sinatra brought Dean Martin onstage at the Jerry Lewis MDA telethon, reuniting the former comedy team;
Mao Zedong died;
The Muppet Show premiered;
U2 formed;
Stevie Wonder released Songs in the Key of Life;
Jimmy Carter defeated Gerald Ford in the US Presidential election;
The Band held a farewell concert (later known as The Last Waltz);
The Eagles released Hotel California;
Eric Gagne, Alfonso Soriano, Paul Scheer, Isla Fisher, Charlie Day, Lance Berkman, Rashida Jones, Ali Larter, Ja Rule, Freddie Prinze, Jr., Corey Stoll, Reese Witherspoon, Keri Russell, Aaron Brooks, Peyton Manning, Candace Cameron, Glenn Howerton, Melissa Joan Hart, Sean Maguire, Joey Lawrence, Tim Duncan, Ryan Leaf, Kevin Garnett, Miguel Tejada, Cillian Murphy, Colin Farrell, Blake Shelton, Chad Pennington, Fred Savage, Diane Kruger, Luke Bryan, Benedict Cumberbatch, Don Hertzfeldt, Sam Worthington, Soleil Moon Frye, Drew Lacey, JC Chasez, Audrey Tautou, Antoine Walker, Sarah Chalke, Alison Sweeney, Ronaldo, Stephanie McMahon, Alicia Silverstone, Taylor Hicks, Nick Swardson, Emily Deschanel, Ryan Reynolds, Pat Tillman, Jaleel White, Ana Faris, Matthew Shepherd, Mark Duplass, Dominic Monaghan, Takeo Spikes, Joe Manganiello, and Danny McBride were born;
While Agatha Christie, Howlin’ Wolf, Paul Robeson, Ernesto Miranda, Werner Heisenberg, Percy Faith, Lee J. Cobb, Sal Mineo, Florence Ballard, Busby Berkeley, Luchino Visconti, Bernard Montgomery, E.H. Shepard, Howard Hughes, Carol Reed, Martin Heidegger, J. Paul Getty, Bobby Hackett, Adolph Zukor, James Wong Howe, Mickey Cohen, Fritz Lang, Dalton Trumbo, Jean Gabin, Rosalind Russell, Benjamin Britten, and Richard Daley died.
The following is a list of my ten favorite films released in 1976:
10) Freaky Friday
Because of a random wish made on Friday the 13th, Ellen Andrews (Barbara Harris) and her daughter Annabel (Jodie Foster) inexplicably switch bodies. Ellen goes to school and navigates the treacherous waters of high school in Annabel’s body, while Annabel tries to manage the house in Ellen’s.
1976 was a pretty good year for Jodie Foster. While her performance in Taxi Driver is usually hailed as among the best of the year, I prefer this breezy film about the generation gap. It was a staple of my childhood and my fondness for it has not waned.
The story of Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) and Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) taking down the evil Richard Nixon is a paean to journalism. This is what we assume journalists do, scrupulously follow leads to uncover the truth regardless of what famous and powerful people are affected.
Aided by fantastic performances from peak level Hoffman and Redford, the film turns the fall of Richard Nixon into the closest thing the twentieth century has to the epic histories of Shakespeare.
8) Silent Movie
Mel Funn (Mel Brooks) is a down on his luck film director with a big idea. He wants to resurrect the silent film genre, but the reluctant studio chief (Sid Caesar) only agrees to green-light the project if Funn can convince Hollywood’s biggest stars to appear in the film.
Unfortunately, the big conglomerate, Engulf and Devour is planning on taking over the studio and, worried a big hit will put it out of their price range, attempts to sabotage his film.
Not quiet as funny as Brooks’s earlier films, this is both a loving homage to the silent pictures of his youth and a biting satire of 1970s Hollywood, its obsession with stardom, and the domination of business over artistic decisions.
Ironically, because so much of the humor is based on topical in-jokes and relies on stars who were famous forty years ago (Burt Reynolds, Liza Minelli, Paul Newman, and Brooks’ wife Anne Bancroft), this movie is, in many ways, as dated to modern audiences as the silent movies it made fun of were in 1976.
7) Bugsy Malone
While Fat Sam and his chief rival Dandy Dan fight over control of a speakeasy, boxing promoter Bugsy Malone (Scott Baio) begins a relationship with Blousey Brown, but has to fend off the advances of Fat Sam’s girlfriend, Tallulah (Jodie Foster).
In the end, after all the characters are splurged by custard shooting guns, they put aside their difference and join in a rousing musical number.
It’s surreal to think this playful performance from Foster was in theaters the same year as her legendary performance as a child prostitute in Taxi Driver; while Scott Baio, best remembered for his bland work as the titular Charles in Charge, is surprisingly funny and engaging.
Alan Parker’s gangster musical featuring a cast of children is a bold subversion of the genre and you can see him developing the techniques he’d later use in his masterpiece Pink Floyd’s The Wall.
6) Face to Face
Psychiatrist Dr. Jenny Isaksson (Liv Ullmann) has a nervous breakdown, pushing her relationship with her husband, Dr. Tomas Jacobi (Erland Josephson), to the breaking point.
It’s not as wonderful as his earlier film Scenes from a Marriage (also featuring Ulmann and Josephson), but this middle period film from Ingmar Bergman is full of the existential angst and personal reflection we’ve come to expect from him.
Ullman’s role is flashier and her tortured love affair with Bergman has been mythologized ad nauseam, but Josephson’s subtle work is the glue which holds everything together. In a vacuum, her performance might be overpowering, but Josephson’s subtle, nuanced performance keeps it grounded.
5) That’s Entertainment, Part II
The greatest hits compilation of the golden days of MGM features clips from such stars as Louis Armstrong, Judy Garland, Greta Garbo, Abbott and Costello, Debbie Reynolds, Spencer Tracy, and Katherine Hepburn, but the highlight is a dancing duet between legendary hoofers Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly (only the second collaboration in their long, storied careers).
Sadly, Astaire never danced on camera again.
This is a loving reminder of why we continue to love classic Hollywood films.
4) Cria Cuervos
After Ana’s mother dies, her childhood is one horrible experience after another. Constantly thwarted in her attempts at self-determination, she escapes her misery by fantasizing about her deceased mother, imagining conversations with her future self, and attempting to poison her father.
Most films mythologize childhood as a period of perfect innocence, fixing it as an idyllic time before the worries of adulthood make life more difficult and shallow. Carlos Saura’s film sees childhood as a time of frustration and impotence, when you cannot decide anything for yourself.
It’s refreshing to see a movie dealing with childhood unsentimentally and rebelling against all too familiar tropes.
3) Rocky
Before Rocky had defeated the USSR, come back from retirement to defeat a young up and comer, and trained the son of his one time bitter rival, the original film was a quirky low-key character study.
This film has a distinctly 70s charm with believable working class types facing insurmountable odds. Stallone is brilliant, and Shire is wonderful as a lower class version of Annie Hall (which debuted the following year).
The film illustrates an important, but little recognized fact: most underdogs do not win. Here, the point is not winning, but in proving you belong in the arena.
The popular sequels ensure the series will remain a part of popular culture for years to come, but they pale in comparison to the energy and vibrancy of this film, which was unafraid to be odd and weird.
2) Marathon Man
Living abroad in South America, Nazi war criminal Dr. Christian Szell (Laurence Olivier) helps government agencies track down other former Nazis in exchange for protection and help in smuggling diamonds stolen from Jews during the war.
After Szell’s brother dies, he travels to New York to make sure there isn’t a mole in his organization. When he kills one of his lieutenants, Henry Levy (Roy Schieder), Henry’s brother Babe (Dustin Hoffman) is inadvertently dragged into the world of international smuggling.
Hoffman and Olivier are par excellence and William Devane is great as a double agent (how did he not have a more substantial career?).
The infamous torque scene with Szell drilling into Babe’s teeth remains chilling forty years later.
There have been numerous films about the Nazis and the unspeakable atrocities of the Holocaust. Fewer films about the ramifications of their actions. Even fewer about the exploits of escaped war criminals, perhaps because of the compromising and embarrassing circumstances of their post-war lives, often with tacit support from other governments.
1) Network (1976)
After learning he’s been fired as anchor of the UBS Evening News, Howard Beale (Peter Finch) stuns his audience by announcing he’ll commit suicide on air during next Tuesday’s program.
Beale pledges to offer an apology the next evening, but instead launches into a tirade about the current state of America, declaring he’s “mad as hell and not gonna take it anymore.”
His unrestrained anger is a hit and the show rises to the top, but when he turns his indignation towards the network and a proposed merger with a Saudi conglomerate, he’s confronted by company chairman Arthur Jensen (Ned Beatty). The charismatic, delusional Jensen convinces Beale to soften his approach.
However the kinder, gentler Beale’s ratings plummet and, to boost the network, executive Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway) and her boss Frank Hackett (Robert Duvall) make a deal with terrorists to assassinate Beale on air.
This movie about network politics in the 1970s, ponders the role of ethics and morality in contemporary capitalism.
It’s a shame Rocky beat it out for Best Picture but it’s an understandable debate. However, Beatrice Straight should never have beaten Jodie Foster in the race for Best Supporting Actress. She was in the movie for less than six minutes while Foster’s star-making role has more than withstood the test of time.
Sidney Lumet’s a great director, but the credit for this film belongs to writer Paddy Chayefsky who brilliantly foreshadows Rush Limbaugh, Keith Olbermann, Bill O’Reilly, and Rachel Maddow. Anger made for great television then and continues to do so today.
